An Extension of Margins, a Place in Bed

Love as space without absence.

There’s always a moment after it starts snowing where the silence sharpens and I begin to understand what exactly has been going on out there. Even here, in my apartment in Brooklyn, the world goes into a familiar quiet that is apparent on instinct and memory. It’s the kind of quiet where I might not even hear the breath leave my own mouth. In my room, the curtains are closed, but they’re sheer and through them, light off the subway platform passes and streaks the wall this orange color I only notice when it snows. I’ll lie there, head flat on the pillow, staring at the ceiling, and listen to the sound of the washing machine filling with water while the dishwasher rushes through a rinse cycle. And even though I can hear those sounds they strike the blanketed quiet with precision that I can’t deny is there holding everything. Like somehow silence and noise for a moment are not contradictive things but more like oil and water and when mixed separate themselves so we can see both at the same time. 

I’ll lie there for a while trying to sleep listening to the soundless noise, looking toward the clumps of snow that might not last until morning, that might not even be sticking now, and they’ll glow that same orange color as my wall. It’s, to me, a thing of beauty the kind you stay up at night for. So I’ll do that, I’ll sit with the moment for a long time and look around my room as if suddenly I’ll find someone listening too but I never do. Seven years in this apartment and no one’s ever been there. So I think before I sleep, I wish someone loved me. 

I feel that way often but don’t much say it because the words seem to evoke a sense of disparity I do not believe myself to have. People do love me and are there. Down the hall, my sister sleeps, across Brooklyn my friends are in their beds. If I wanted to I could walk to the other end of my apartment and, like my dad would do, shake my sister awake so she can see the natural order of the world-- predicted phenomena or a recurring forecast, but I don’t. I could call someone with hope they’ll wake and answer and hold my phone to the quiet and ask them to listen and they would because my life is abundantly full of people who love me in that kind of way. People who stand from a certain vantage and look at the world the way I ask them to from time to time. 

However, no one is in my bed with me, no one is sleeping in my tiny room where through the cracks of the door the washing machine is heard and from the curtains, a world keeps the light on across the way. It’s just something I want. I admit at some other time, in another age, there was a kind of wanting in me that saw love as a solution to a problem, a patch to a gaping hole. I wanted to fill the place where nothing was and saw that missing part and new thing as a very beautiful piece of existence I did not yet have access to. 

I suppose what I mean is that I’d imagined for a long time love belonged to or was some contractual extension of a problem. The younger me, the inexperienced me thought it would prove something I did not yet believe about myself and wanted to. Something about worth or beauty or the things we are deserving of. Only to get older, only to really have it for the first time in my hands with a sense of understanding that worthiness or unworthiness made no difference, we got love when we got it. Sometimes on accident, sometimes with intention, but to labor over the idea that not having it was because I couldn’t be loved for some reason was not only wasteful but false. 

And yet when I adopted this new idea, somehow I still placed love as a matter of having to earn it. Veiled under self-improvement, every time one suffering ended I couldn’t imagine a new one in its place. Or, at least, I thought that whatever pain I had would be made easier by the love I had finally grown into deserving. There was always a final lesson, always something I did not know and now that I did I was good enough, mature enough, to welcome an equally mature love in the place my old heart had been. Ten times reborn, a hundred, waiting and waiting in a quiet room while snow falls outside my window. I want wiser hands, tell me what I don’t know I’d think while reaching uncalloused fingers across the bed and patting for the place I hoped to find someone to be. 

But it isn’t like that now. 

The kid I nanny runs and jumps on my back when we’re playing tag, his laughter rises up through the atmosphere, a cat is meowing outside my friend’s apartment, its collar catches the light, my eyes are puffy, I’m brushing my teeth and I have a knot at the crown of my head. The moment plays out before me with a beauty that instinctually I turn to see if anyone else has witnessed it, the preciousness of being not just alive, but in my life. Your world extends and what you’d once thought of as a hole was really a margin, a moveable boundary in which the edges of your world are bigger than you thought they could be.

And that is love isn’t it, to see beauty and turn away, checking if they are looking too? To find a space beside you big enough for a person to lay flat beside you so that when this world, when my beautiful turbulent life flourishes in the way I like there is someone there to witness it. To see when the wind kisses instead of gusts and gales, the bright light of morning faded by spring, to hear the ocean from my room. Where, in a moment of abundance my love for this life as it appears before me grows so large all I want to do is share it. Not even because it’s particularly unique or moving, but because it’s mine. That’s really it. I love this life so much I can’t hold it all on my own. I want to make a gift of a burden. 

So maybe yes by definition that’s a problem, to have too much, to need help holding it, but it’s different than how it was before. To want love because there’s something here, rather than to need it because you’ve got nothing and you think it will bring to this place something to be grateful for. I don’t believe such scarcity. Quietly, over the hills of this decade, love has arrived, and it is no longer a delivery, but a witness. It’s with a certain pride I say I want to be loved because I’ve made choices and many of them were good ones. I  have movies I want to show you and restaurants I want to try.

And it isn’t because I’m lonely, I’m not lonely. In fact, it’s part of why I want for anything at all because there are people here who care and in knowing me want to care for you too. People who would answer the phone late at night, who’d listen to the quiet. That, to me, is the most beautiful part, the humanity of it. Where reaching through space and time toward the edges of our life we search for someone who hasn’t even arrived yet. Not because we want to fill something, because we’re alone, but because this life is good and abundant, and we think they’d like it. We want to be kind to someone. We care about people we’ve never even met.

But I know that they’re real, and that a love like that exists. The kind where by loving someone you love the extended atmosphere around them. I know it exists because I have it, and because my friends have it, and because one foggy morning my dad woke us up to drag us down the street to see a turtle crossing the road and we stood watching it until he was ready to take us home. I know there are people who in consequence of loving you will open their tired eyes, will leave their warm bed just to share this life with you.

“And, yes, I have a crush on memories that were surely not as beautiful as I have made them out to be. Because that’s the whole trick. I’ve had crushes on all my friends, and if they don’t have one back on me that’s fine because I’m still going to text them at unfortunate and odd hours of the day with some useless miracle that I couldn’t possibly keep to myself. So few of my crushes speak back. I am cultivating my comfort with unanswered desires, and it is going well. I have room for so much more. I say a prayer. I fall in love.” On Summer Crushing by Hanif Abdurraqib

And so on and so forth I sit and try to write something and no matter how much I love life it did not this year occur to me to think too much about it, which makes me sad. November 3rd, 2023 12:48 AM

I hate when we make villains of the world. Haven’t you been hungry too? November 17th, 2023 2:23 PM

The next time most of us speak we’ll be in a new year. I admit words have been hard lately. I don’t know if I’m tired or if life has taken up this ineffable quality where it is challenging me to sit longer with the feelings I’ve had and to not immediately attempt to figure them out, to write them down. Either way, to sum up this year proved difficult with the yearbook and it proves difficult now. When I sat down to write about the end of 2023, however, there was one particular quality of it that even as it arrives in memory manages to move me. Which is gratitude, i’m overwhelmed at times by the way my life has befallen me. Without discrimination or reduction, with both the terrible qualities of summer and the sweet and soft arrivals of spring, I feel an immense swelling in my heart that’s hard not to collapse under. That’s just it, nothing particularly profound, nothing outrageously new. This year my life turned like a kaleidoscope and how everything fell into place gave cause to sit with it a while. And I know things change, we grow, we get boyfriends, we have children or what have you, but it will not change the memory of this year. The memory of how it felt to take the train home having just left you all and feel how difficult it would be to get angry, angry with how it all worked out. Because the fact is I wouldn’t risk it, wouldn’t go back and change anything. I don’t know, I hope you understand. I wish there were better words, but there aren’t. So I’ll say this, thanks for sharing this life with me. I cared about you before I knew you. I made all those choices just so we could meet, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

See you on the other side.

Here is the last mood board of the year, use it well!

If you wanna hear more about this theme, my paid newsletter comes out in two weeks. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. If you’ve had enough, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy soon.

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Here’s to coffee Fridays, to sharing this life, with people here, with people on their way

Love always,

Chloé